Operations

There was once a time early in my career when I would SSH to each VMware ESXi host and manually update the root account’s password. As time went by and the environment I was responsible for grew larger, so did the workload for resetting root account passwords regularly. Eventually, I researched and learned that these VMware ESXi local user accounts could be modified using VMware PowerCLI, and password updates became a much easier task.

You might not know it from how VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly VMware vRealize Orchestrator) is marketed today, but originally, Aria Automation Orchestrator was bundled as a component of VMware vCenter Server. Titled VMware vCenter Orchestrator back in the day, it was one of the best ways to automate actions within your VMware vCenter Server. While vCenter Orchestrator was rebranded as vRealize Orchestrator, and now as Aria Automation Orchestrator, it is still included as a feature with each VMware vCenter Server license.

VMware announced the initial availability (IA) of VMware vSphere 8.0 on October 11, 2022. This new status of “initial availability” follows the new release model that VMware is utilizing for all future vSphere releases. This new release of vSphere is packed with many new features as well as many deprecated features. For a quick overview of what’s new in this release, view the VMware Blog post: Announcing: vSphere 8 Initial Availability.

While browsing the VMware Flings website, I recently ran across a Fling previously released in November of 2021 titled vSphere Diagnostic Tool that I found to be quite interesting. The tool is a set of python scripts that execute various diagnostic commands against a vCenter Server appliance. The scripts aim to rapidly isolate common known issues with vCenter Server appliances to aid and provide the end-user with information on how to remediate the problems.

vRealize Operations has received its latest update on April 25, 2022. vRealize Operations 8.6.3 is a maintenance release which resolves several important security, performance, stability, and functionality issues identified in the product.